Jenny Delasalle's blog

Month: September 2016

It has been Peer Review Week this week: I’ve been watching the hashtag on Twitter with interest (and linked to it in a blogpost for piirus.ac.uk) and on Monday I attended a webinar called “Recognising Review – New and Future Approaches or acknowledging the Peer Review Process”.

I do like webinars, as I’ve blogged before: professional development/horizon scanning from my very own desktop! This week’s one featured talks from Paperhive and Publons, amongst others, both of which have been explored on this blog in the past. I was particularly interested to hear that Publons are interested in recording not only peer review effort, but also editorial contributions. (Right at the end of the week this year, there have been suggestions that editorial work be the focus of next year’s peer review week so it seems to me that we’ve come full circle.) A question from the audience raised the prospect of a new researcher metric based on peer review tracking. I guess that’s an interesting space to watch!

I wondered where Peer Review Week came from: it seems to be a publisher initiative if Twitter is anything to go by: the hashtag is dominated by their contributions. On Twitter at least, it attracted some publisher criticism: if you deliberately look at ways to recognise peer review then some academics are going to ask whether it is right for publishers to profit so hugely from their free work. Some criticisms were painful to read and some were also highly amusing:

There wasn’t much discussion of the issue of open vs blind or double blind peer review, which I found interesting because recognition implies openness, at least to me. And there was some interesting research reported on in the THE earlier this month, about eliminating gender bias through double blind reviews, so openness in the context of peer review is an issue that I feel torn about. Discussion on Twitter seemed to focus mostly on incentives for peer review, and I suppose recognition facilitates that too.

Peer Review Week has also seen one of the juiciest stories in scholarly communication: fake peer reviews! We’ve been able to identify so much dodgy practice in the digital age, from fake papers and fake authors to fake email addresses so that you can be your own peer reviewer and citation rings. Some of this is, on one level, highly amusing: papers by Maggie Simpson, or a co-author who is, in fact your cat. But on another level it is also deeply concerning, and so it’s a space that will continue to fascinate me because it definitely looks like a broken system: how do we stick it all together?